Expiration Date (35 page)

A
FTER
H
AUNTED
House Party was in the can, he had finally stopped trying to chase his earlier success in show business. He had enrolled in the UCLA law school, and two years later passed the California bar and moved to Seal Beach to practice real-estate law.

Sometimes during the ensuing decade he had wondered if the advent of Loretta deLarava had scared him away from the movies…and then he had always recalled the artistic merits of
Haunted House Party
, and had wryly dismissed the suspicion.

He had stayed away from Hollywood, though, and had gradually stopped seeing his friends in the industry; and even so, he was careful to keep his home address and phone number a secret, and to vary the route he took to his office, and to come and
go there on no set schedule. He kept a gun in his office and car and bedside table. Superstitiously, he never ate potato salad.

And in fact it wasn’t potato salad that she finally got him with, in 1975. It was a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing, and lots of exotic mushrooms.

When Johanna returned to her magazine, Shadroe, who hadn’t called himself Nicholas Bradshaw since his “death” in ’75, took one more look at the static television screen and then stumped into the little room where the tub was, and by the glare of the bare overhead lightbulb he stared with distaste down at the dozens of ice cubes floating in the gray water—like broken glass in a tub of mercury.

The sooner he took his bath and got out, the sooner he could be in his car and driving west on Ocean Boulevard to the marina, where he would climb aboard his boat and spend the long hours of darkness sitting and staring at another TV set switched to CBS with the brightness control turned down just far enough to black out the picture, watching the white line that would certainly be on that screen too, and listening for the burping croaks of his pigs.

Like every other night.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

A
T
the northwest corner of MacArthur Park, crouched under a pyrocantha bush in the shadow of the statue of General MacArthur, Kootie watched as his fingers opened his bag of purchases from ninety-nine-cent store on Sixth Street. The box of insecticide proved to be
MIRACULOUS INSECTICIDE CHALK—MADE IN CHINA
, and inside it were two sticks of white chalk with Chinese writing stamped into them. An instruction sheet on flimsy paper was all written in Chinese figures, and Kootie leaned out of the shadow of the statue’s base as his hands held the paper up close to his eyes in the leaf-filtered radiance of a streetlight.

“‘Directions for use
…’” he heard his own voice say thoughtfully. Kootie started to interrupt, “You read Chinese—?” but Edison took over again and finished, “…
On door, use enclosed chalk to write “Bugs, kill yourselves forthwith.”’”

Then Edison was laughing an old man’s laugh with Kootie’s boy’s voice, and he flipped the paper over. “Kidding,” Edison said. On this side the directions were in English. “The
chalk is more effective to use at night,’”
Edison read, and Kootie could see that he was reading it correctly this time. “Well, that’s handy, eh?
‘Draw several parallel lines each two to three centimeters apart across the track which the insect used to take
…’ I like ‘used to,’ as if the job’s already done. Well,” he said, folding up the instructions, “this will do some good, though it’s a child’s version of a device I set up in the Western Union office in ‘64 in Cincinnati, and later in Boston—a series of plates hooked up to a battery. That was for night work, too—I told everybody it was for rats or roaches or whatever they’d believe, but it was to get some rest from the damn ghosts.”

Kootie caught a brief glimpse of memory: a big dark room in what had once been a downtown Cincinnati restaurant, copper wire connections arcing and popping all night, the harsh smell of the leaky batteries, and morose, transparent ectoplasmic figures huddled in the corners far away from the stinging metal plates.

Kootie’s hands waved. “Get us back out to the sidewalk, will you boy?”

Kootie tucked the bag back into his shirt and then obediently straightened up and walked across the grass and stepped up to the sidewalk. He started to brush dirt off his pants, but found that he was crouching to draw a circle all the way around himself on the concrete with the stick of chalk. His lips twitched, and then Edison used them to say, “I’d better let you do it; spit in the circle. If I try it you’ll do something else at the same moment and we’ll wind up with spit all down our chin.”

Our
chin? thought Kootie—but he did spit on the sidewalk before straightening up.

“Very well,
your
chin,” said Edison. “Now crouch again and let me draw some lines.”

Kootie squatted down, and then watched as his hand drew a maze of lines around the circle: parallel lines, spirals, radii from the circle’s edge—until this section of sidewalk looked, Kootie thought, like the site of some hopscotch Olympics. Cars hissed past in front of him in the street beyond the curb, but the only close sounds were the click-and-scratch of the chalk and his own eager breath.

The chalk was being worn down to a stump as cartoon eyes were added, and more wheels were drawn, and Crosshatch squares were carefully colored in. The production was a couple of yards wide now.

Kootie shivered. It was cold out here, and he didn’t like having his arm stretched out for so long. “Will you be done when that stick of chalk is used up?” he asked hopefully. There had been two sticks of the chalk in the yellow-and-orange box, and he hoped Edison wasn’t going to need the other one as well.

He was about to repeat his question when Edison spoke instead: “What? What is it now?”

“How much of that stuff have you got to draw?”

“Stuff…” Kootie’s head was swung this way and that, and he had the impression that Edison was even more bewildered than he was by the convoluted designs he’d drawn on the sidewalk.

“Did
I
—” Edison began. He took a deep breath. “Yes.
There
. That’ll stop any ghosts or ghost hunters who might pick up my trail.”

As Kootie presumed to straighten up, he could feel his recent memories being ransacked. “And,” Edison went on, “it might slow down your…
one-armed murderer
. Now—how much does a dinner cost around here?
Oaffg
—Never mind, what I meant was, let’s find some place to eat.” Kootie’s head tilted to look down, and again their gaze swept the lunatic drawing. “After that we can come back here and—see if we’ve caught something to put in your film canister.”

Only now did Kootie realize that his purchases at the ninety-nine-cent store might not have been has own idea; and he wondered why Edison apparently wanted to catch a ghost. But the notion of dinner was compelling.

“I’ve been smelling barbecue for a while,’” he ventured.

“Good lad, I’m not getting anything…
olfactory
, myself. Lead the way, by all means—it’s never a good idea to turn your back on your nose.”

The thrilling blend of onion and peppers and lemon on the breeze seemed to carry at least the promise of warmth, and Kootie was briskly rubbing his arms above the elbows as he followed the smells across the Park View intersection and around a corner, to a doorway under a red neon sign that read
JUMBO’S BURGOO & MOP TROTTER
. Even from out on the street Kootie could hear laughter and raised voices from within.

“It’s food,” Edison assured him. “Southern stuff.”

(Again Kootie got a memory flash—Spanish moss hanging from old live oaks along the banks of the Caloosahatchee as he chugged upriver in an old sloop, the winter house in Fort Myers among the towering bamboo and tropical fruit trees, cornmeal-dipped fried catfish served alongside corn on the cob that had crinkly hairpins stuck in the ends for handles…)

“And without any sense of smell I won’t be able to taste any of it,” Edison went on in an aggrieved voice as Kootie pulled open the screen door and stepped into the place. “I’d much rather have stayed deaf instead.”

Redwood picnic tables were lined up on the flagstone floor, with a counter along one side of the room—
ORDER
at the near end,
PICKUP
at the other—and in the kitchen beyond that, Kootie could just see the tops of big shiny steel ovens. Framed hand-painted menus swung in the hot air above the counter, and the other three walls, dark old brickwork, were crowded with black-and-white photos that all seemed to be autographed. The cooks and the countermen and all the men and women and children at the tables were black, but for the first time since losing Raffle and Fred, Kootie didn’t feel like an excluded tugitive.

“What can we do for you, little mon?” rumbled a voice above Kootie’s head. Looking up, he saw the broad, red-eyed face of a counterman staring down at him.

“I’m going to have—” began Kootie, from habit wondering what sort of pulses and grains and vegetables they might serve here; then he finished defiantly,
“meat!”

“Meat you shall have,” the man said agreeably, nodding. “Of what subcategory and method of preparation?”

“Barbecue pork ribs,” said Edison while Kootie was still trying to read the menu through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, “and the turnip and mustard greens with bacon dumplings—” (“Please,” interjected Kootie breathlessly, just to be polite.) “And a big mug of beer—” (“N-n-no,” Kootie managed to interrupt, “I’m too young, I’ll just have a large Coke!”) “And,” Edison went on—(“
Not
” said Kootie, who could see what was coming)—a cigar,” finished Edison in defeat, “dammit.”

The black man was frowning and nodding. “Yes,
sir
,” he said. “Nothing wrong with
you
.” He was tapping keys on the cash register, which hummed and spat out a receipt. “Seven dollars and a quarter, that comes to.”

Kootie gave the man a ten-dollar bill, keeping his mouth and throat firmly closed against Edison’s outraged grunting.

The man gave him his change. “It’ll be at the far end of the counter there, in just a minute. Do you think you can keep the number
twenty-two
in mind? Can you remember it even now?”

“Twenty-two,” said Kootie. “Sure. Why?”

“Because that’s the number that one of us up here will call, when your supper is ready for you to pick up. I can’t see why that shouldn’t be satisfactory to everybody concerned, can you?”

“No, sir,” said Kootie. He limped to a table that was occupied only at one end by a couple of old men playing dominoes, and he wondered if he might ever get used to everyone thinking that he was crazy; then he wondered what schemes Edison might come up with for finding a place to sleep tonight, and to make money tomorrow. Remembering the chalk drawing, he hoped the old man’s ghost wasn’t going senile.

When his number was called and he went up to get his tray, his gaze was caught by a polished wooden box on the counter. A metal rod, hinged at the bottom, ran up the front of it, and a piece of paper had been taped to the rod, with
L.A. CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL
hand-lettered vertically on the paper. On the counter in front of the box was a cardboard bowl of peppermints.

Kootie’s gaze was snagged on the lettering. He read it downward, and then upward, and it was the same letters either way. This seemed important, this proof that moving backward could be the same as forward, that the last letter of a sentence could be not only identical to the lead-off capital letter but the very same thing….

He realized that he had been standing here, holding the tray with the steaming plates on it and staring at the vertical words, for at least several seconds. He made himself look away and breathe deeply. “What,” he whispered, “is it?”

“That’s a cigar lighter,” rumbled his throat as he crossed to his table and sat back down. “Well,” he answered, “you didn’t get a cigar, so forget about it.”

Kootie made both of them focus on the food.

The ribs were drenched in a hot sauce that reeked of tomato and onion and cider vinegar, and he gnawed every shred of meat off the bones and was glad of the napkin dispenser on the table. The greens only got nibbled, because Edison couldn’t taste them and Kootie found them strong and rank, but he did eat most of the dumplings.

A mouthful of Coke ran down his chin onto his shirt when Edison opened his mouth to whisper, “My God,
it’s fly paper!”

Then Kootie watched his hands untuck his shirt to get at the bag and pull out of it the box of film. The film cartridge itself was dumped out onto the table, and Kootie’s fingers snatched up the empty black plastic canister. Kootie was about to point out that the film was in the yellow metal thing, but Edison hissed, “That fella’s going to light a cigarette!” Sure enough, one of the old men at the table had taken out of his pocket a pack of Kools and was shaking one out.

Kootie’s head snapped forward, and then he couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not when he drooled some Coke into the empty plastic film container.

“Get to the cigar lighter before he does,” Edison whispered. “Go, or I’ll motivate for you, this is too lucky a chance to waste.”

His legs already twitching impatiently, Kootie pushed back the bench, got to his feet and wobbled over to the wooden box on the counter.
How does it work?
he thought.

Edison whispered, “
Don’t
work it—act like you just came over here to get a mint.”

Kootie started to say
Okay
, but had got no further than the “Oke—” when the ceiling lights dimmed and the air was suddenly cold; and he was distantly grateful when he felt his knees lock, for sudden dizziness had made the field of his vision dwindle like a receding movie screen. He thought he sensed someone big standing behind him, but he couldn’t turn around.